A Giant Photo Connects Fans to Ballet Stars
A Giant Photo Connects Fans to Ballet Stars
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Some richly attired New York City Ballet fans have taken to lying down on the floor at intermissions. Other well-heeled patrons are making the climb from the orchestra to the Fourth Ring for a better view. And social media sites are beginning to fill up with odd images, including several that appear to show Sébastien Marcovici, a principal dancer, partnering perfect strangers.
The catalyst for all these strange doings at City Ballet is in the promenade of the David H. Koch Theater, where the inlaid travertine marble floor has been covered with a 6,500-square-foot vinyl photograph of more than 80 City Ballet dancers, roughly life size, who are arranged on a sea of crumpled white paper. From above, it becomes clear that the dancers form a gigantic eye.
The eye is the work of J R, the French street artist, who is internationally known for mounting large-scale public photography projects around the world, from the favelas of Brazil to Kenya to Times Square. He was commissioned to create it for the winter season as part of City Ballet’s new art series, which aims to draw more art fans to ballet. J R, who once wheat-pasted pictures on the streets of France, also wheat-pasted enormous ballerinas’ legs and toe shoes on the outside of the Koch Theater. But it is his floor photo inside that is generating buzz.
“People are always more creative than I can even imagine,” J R, who goes by his punctuation-less initials, said in an interview. He said that he had been dazzled by the photographs people have posted on Instagram with hashtags including #JRNYCBallet and #NYCBArtSeries: of a man lying on the ground who looks as if he is lifting a ballerina, of women lying on the hands of supine dancers as if being lifted, of shadows of walkers draping the dancers.
Shortly before Saturday’s matinee, Paloma Bonnin, a 10-year-old dance student from Paraguay, got down on the floor and posed for some pictures herself, mimicking the splits and poses of the City Ballet dancers. At intermission, Philip Schweitzer, a ballet fan from the Bronx, couldn’t resist the temptation to bend down to touch the floor. “I told my wife, Esther, it feels like linoleum,” he said.
Grace Zhang, 24, who works in advertising, climbed from her seats in the First Ring to the Fourth Ring balcony for a better view. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “This is specifically incorporating ballet — the beauty, the power, the vulnerability. It’s pure and beautiful.”
J R, 30, said that he liked that his work was creating a reverse migration, where the patrons in the expensive seats were going up to the cheaper seats for the views. “Now you’re inviting everyone to come up there,” he said. “And I like that, that it breaks boundaries — that anyone should be on any floor, it doesn’t matter.”
The installation will be opened to the public free for several hours each day from Sunday through Feb. 9.
It is the second installation in City Ballet’s Art Series, designed to draw newcomers to the ballet. In addition to commissioning the work, the company is putting on three special performances — the first was on Thursday, and the next will be on Feb. 7 and 13 — aimed at art fans new to ballet; every seat costs $29.
Karen Girty, the company’s senior director of marketing and media, said City Ballet had initially offered tickets to the thousands of people who follow J R on social media and followed up with targeted ad campaigns at subway stations on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn neighborhoods including Williamsburg and Greenpoint.
At last year’s installation, by the Brooklyn artist collective Faile, 70 percent of the people who went to the two special art-theme performances were new to City Ballet. An unusually high number of those first-timers came back to the ballet, she said: about 7 percent. The previous record for getting first-time ballet audiences to return came when the company put on Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty” soon after “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” and about 5.8 percent of the “Nutcracker” novices were enticed back.
Alexander M. Roth, 25, a film and theater producer, is not new to ballet, but he does make it a point to go to the Art Series performances regardless of what is on the program. “It was one of the hottest tickets in the city,” he said. “Models, people from film, fashion, art — everyone was there.”
Mr. Roth said that he enjoys collecting the limited-edition pieces that the artists give the audiences on those nights — a painted wooden block from Faile last year, and a pop-up card of the theater showing J R’s work both inside and outside of it this year.
Faye Arthurs, a member of the corps de ballet who is in the retina of the eye, watched Luna Helm, 7, dance over her picture after Saturday’s matinee. “She was just dancing up and down on our heads, then she was running, and making huge passes, and leaping right over the center,” she said. “So brilliant.”
Ms. Arthurs especially enjoyed a photograph of her photograph that was posted on the Internet. “Someone had put a Birkin bag on my hands, like I was holding it up,” she said. “Which I kind of loved. I wish they would just give me one in real life.”
Shortly before the Saturday matinee, J R, who said that he often draws inspiration from what people post about his work on social media, made a suggestion to Peter Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief, about bringing the dancers back for a follow-up.
“You know what I would love to do is get them all back here, and do a photo from up there, reinteracting with the piece, where you lose what’s real and what’s not,” he said. “Because I’ve been looking on social media, what people have been posting from just the last two nights — they are so creative.”
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